Absurdity Cubed
In a class at the University of North Carolina (which sometimes offers a course entitled "Queer Theory"), a student characterized homosexuality as "disgusting" and "a sin". His professor then sent an e-mail to the entire class charging that his remarks constituted "hate speech" under the university's non-discrimination and anti-harassment policy, which prohibits “offensive speech or behavior of a biased or prejudiced nature related to one’s personal characteristics, such as race, color, national origin, sex, religion, handicap, age or sexual orientation." Now, according to the Associated Press, the federal Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights is conducting an investigation to "determine whether the teacher's actions amounted to harassment". If we are to criminalize undergraduate non-sequiturs, we may as well outlaw higher education. If we only promote students too timid to voice spirited but inappropriate or poorly thought out sentiments, we will soon have to suffer government by people even more boring than the officials with whom we are already afflicted, headed, not by an elected president, but a special prosecutor appointed by the mandarins of political correctness - a prospect which ought to call to mind the office of Director of the Committee of Public Safety during the French Revolution.